


Things You Said (That I Wish You Hadn't)

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Declarations Of Love, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Morning After, POV Dorian, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 16:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7112908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think," Cadash says, "that I’m falling in love with you."</p><p>People like Dorian don’t get to fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things You Said (That I Wish You Hadn't)

Sex is the easy part--has _always_ been the easy part. 

Dorian wakes with a start, not in his own room, the old instinct to slip from his lover’s arms and out rising high in his throat. Cadash makes a sleepy sound and pulls him closer, presses his forehead between Dorian’s shoulder blades. His beard tickles his back. Dorian does not flinch--a flinch comes with a _release_. He tenses. Tries to ease away. Be gone before morning. 

The sky is already beginning to light. 

“Mmph,” Cadash says. 

_Too late_. 

His fingers shift, curl against Dorian’s sternum. He would be very interested in a nice morning fuck--it would clarify things, put them back to rights. Dorian _doesn’t_ spend the night. He washes up, straightens his clothes, and slips away. He lounges on his side, bare and brazen, while he watches his lover collect _his_ clothes and make the same hasty exit. 

Narias Cadash kisses the center of his spine, and he shudders. 

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing, Nothing.”

Another kiss, this one over his left shoulder blade, behind his heart. Cadash’s marked hand moves low and warm down to his belly, over his hip, back up again. He scrapes gently with blunt fingernails. His beard, well oiled, is soft against Dorian’s back.

Cadash smiles against his skin, and hums a low note that sends a tremor all through Dorian’s body. 

“You can tell me,” he says, low. “Anything you don’t want, I’ll stop.”

He _laughs_. The sound is pained. He wants two things: for Narias to send him from his quarters and be done with it, and that he never release his hold. It is an old conflict, one raised up with all the other contradictions of his homeland. 

Cadash rises to one elbow and kisses his neck, the place beneath his ear. Dorian might even relax, might welcome his arms around him, might yield to his mouth and his hands. Sex is easy. He half wishes Narias would pin his hips and take him again, as he has the last two nights. Would spread himself and fumble for the vial of oil that’s fallen to the floor. 

Instead, Narias takes his hand and squeezes, massages the aches out of fingers that spend all day gripping a staff, kisses the base of his skull and breathes in the scent of his hair. 

He might relax, but a dropped guard is deadly as a spitting snake. 

“You’re wound like a clock,” Narias says, pulling away. 

He rises to his knees, and Dorian lies back and crosses his arms behind his head. Stretches his legs down to the toe. Yawns. He might feign boredom, desire to return to the library and the new shipment of genealogies that might give truth to their enemy’s origin. But Cadash is here, and he is warm, and he has his hands resting on his thighs now, bare and muscled, with their faint dusting of black hair over his warm-dark skin. He’s watching Dorian’s face, his eyes, his mouth. 

“I think,” he says, “that I’m falling in love with you.” 

A thousand different responses stick in his throat--some broken-sharp like shattered glass, some soft and sad and quickly hidden. _People like me do not get to fall in love_ , he wants to snap. But he doesn’t. He squashes deprecation, allows pomposity the floor. 

“That’s to be expected,” he says at last. “As witty and handsome as I am, how could you resist?”

Narias says nothing for a moment, eyes boring into his, hazel with golden-green flecks and a ring like the well-oiled, well-used grip of a staff around the edge. Lovely eyes. Piercing eyes. 

Dorian lets his own eyes flutter shut, and open again, and prays to anyone listening that he not push _this_. This tender thing they have, this small shoot of--not love, never love, but _something more_ \--he prays Narias will not bring a storm of declarations they cannot weather. 

He licks his lips, and shifts so that he’s leaning back upon his elbows. He raises one brow in what he hopes is a suggestive look, what he knows must only be ridiculous with his hair and moustache all askew. But Dorian has woken in his lover’s arms and he will do anything--anything--he can to salvage what he can have after such a barefaced declaration as Narias had made. 

It works. Narias leans in and takes his mouth, sleep-sour but he does not care. Dorian licks at the seam of his lips, slips his tongue into and out of his mouth in long strokes, pulls his lover down atop him in a motion Narias is only too pleased to follow. 

_I think I’m falling in love with you_.

The words filter unbidden through the clouds in Dorian’s mind. 

He kisses harder, in vain hope that it might pass. 


End file.
